As Marlon LeBlanc sat in the passenger seat of the car, he took a moment to evaluate his confidence in the man driving.

LeBlanc knew Dan Stratford well. He’d coached him at West Virginia University and thought enough of the Englishman to add him to his coaching staff when Stratford’s pro career ended. But here LeBlanc was, weaving through the hilly streets of South London, past block after block of Tudor Revival homes obscured by a deluge of rain and the fog of impending jet lag, to evaluate the first prospect that Stratford had put his full weight behind.

Up the dead-end road to Old Wilsonians Sport Club, on what could’ve passed as a BBC drama backlot, LeBlanc and Stratford were directed past the Bromley club’s main fields, lined with trees in the shadow of the stately clubhouse. They trudged down a hill on the other end of the campus to a field — more dirt than grass at the end of the season — sloping toward a preschool at the road’s edge. There, LeBlanc spotted what he’d traveled so far to see – a 17-year-old toothpick with limbs stringing nets on the goalposts on an empty field some 10 minutes before what Leblanc had been told was kickoff time.

Jack Elliott.

If LeBlanc wasn’t yet skeptical of the story Stratford had used to get him across the Atlantic – that Stratford had found this kid who’d been cut from an academy at age 13 but had so impressed him when they played together for their shared grammar school adult league squad on one of his journeys home – then surely this bleak tableau would rouse suspicion.

“I have to say,” Stratford recalled, “I was a little apprehensive at that point of what might have been going through Marlon’s mind, of OK, what kind of level is this kid playing? What is he about to witness?”

Within an hour, LeBlanc had rendered his verdict. The boy was all limbs and technical ability, playing midfield that blustery May afternoon. But once LeBlanc saw the blond-haired kid blast a goal from 30 yards in off the post, he turned to Stratford, both of them soaked through, with a simple judgement.

“I just said to Dan, ‘Yup, you got the right man,’” LeBlanc said. “‘Congratulations, well done.’”

“It was an interesting game, and I remember I was a bit nervous that he’d come all the way from America to see me,” Elliott, now 22, recalled last week. “But I think I might have put his mind at ease a little bit.”

The rest is history. Elliott went on to sign with West Virginia and star for LeBlanc for four years. He was picked in the fourth round of the MLS SuperDraft, the 77th pick by the Philadelphia Union at a juncture where most teams are lucky to get a USL squad-stuffer, a player good for a year or two. But before a groin injury two weeks ago, Elliott had started 34 straight MLS games, a full season’s worth of action for a player who was told by Fulham Football Club at age 13 that he didn’t have what it took to be a pro.

Elliott’s journey has involved a series of fortunate events, borne of his persistence and devotion to the game. And so much of it stems from that field, where LeBlanc fought off doubts and the concern about the pelting downpour.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever unearth a player like that [again] that has had that kind of meteoric rise,” Stratford said.

Jack Elliott (back row, 16) and the Old Wilsonians, after winning the Old Boys Cup. (Handout photo)

Stratford recognized the path that Elliott would travel; he just didn’t know that he’d be the one to send Elliott on that journey. Like Elliott, Stratford was born in London. He attended Wilson’s School (other notable alumni include actor Michael Caine and John Stevens Henslow, mentor to Charles Darwin). He also played at Fulham, advancing to the reserve side. When his progression to the Cottagers’ first team hit a roadblock, Stratford opted for the American college path, ending up at West Virginia under the tutelage of LeBlanc.

After a standout college career for the Mountaineers, Stratford was drafted by D.C. United in 2008 in the second round of the Supplemental Draft, 24th overall. He made five MLS appearances before heading back to Britain to land via trial at Scottish club Inverness Caledonian Thistle and now-defunct English side Hereford United. His international pedigree made him a valued addition to LeBlanc’s staff once his playing travels ended.

Given his international network, Stratford ventured back to the continent after the 2012 college season, leveraging connections in European academies to scout second-tier prospects who could benefit from the extra seasoning of the college game.

He summarily struck out. So at the end of his trip, he headed home to London for the Christmas holiday and scrounged up a couple of games with his old mates from Old Wilsonian, where he’d attended school and where his dad, Mick, is a math teacher. One of those games included Elliott, in his final year of school, where he fed his voracious soccer appetite with matches for Wilson’s school team and the Old Wilsonian alumni squad. It was a weeknight match against Walton Casuals in a Surrey Premier Cup match (Walton is a slightly higher semi-pro side, playing in the Isthmian League South Division, the eighth tier of the English pyramid). Old Wilsonians suffered a 3-2 setback after extra time, but it registered a different kind of victory.

“He played as a right-center back in a back three, me as a center midfielder,” Stratford said. “He did pretty well and it was actually my dad that said to me after the game – he’d come to watch – he said, ‘Well you haven’t got any players from any of these academies, what about Jack?’ And I guess during the game, I hadn’t really thought about it. And then when my dad mentioned it, I thought, I’ll get his contact information.

“I remember getting him on the phone as we were both driving home from the game, and it kind of started the process there and just said, would you be interested in coming over to the States and so on and so forth. And it kind of went from there.”

Stratford saw what Fulham didn’t a few years early. He recognized Elliott’s savvy reading of the game, a typically European soccer IQ. He saw the technical ability instilled by voracious consumption of whatever action he could get on the pitch, a fluidity that belied his lanky stature. He knew that Elliott’s versatility in midfield or defense would be particularly prized in the college game, where tactics need to be fluid. And Stratford understood that the biggest strike against Elliott, his string-bean physicality, could be rectified once he got an American diet of weight-training and strength building.

All that was left was selling his boss on this crazy notion.

“Dan comes back from being overseas and being home and going to visit his old school and said, ‘I think I found a kid,’” LeBlanc said. “I said, ‘OK.’ And Dan was kind of fresh working for me at the time and Dan had played for me here, and I knew what he was looking for so I felt pretty comfortable with him saying that. But I think in the back of Dan’s mind, he was also thinking, OK, this is my first kid.”

How Elliott arrived at that tilted pitch in the driving rain in May 2013 is its own unusual tale.

He was born in South London, in the middle-class enclave of Norbury, just south of Brixton, to parents of Scottish heritage. Despite an abiding love for soccer, he didn’t play on an organized team until he was 10. He hooked up with local club Croydon Athletic for two years before joining the youth setup at Fulham, then in the English Premier League, about a half-hour away in West London. But after just a year with the Cottagers, they released him, saying that they didn’t envision Elliott developing to handle the physical rigors of pro soccer.

“They said I wasn’t big enough or athletic enough,” the 6-foot-5 Elliott says now with a laugh.

Fulham might have had a point about Elliott’s stature – both Stratford and LeBlanc offer some version of, “if you think he’s thin now, you should’ve seen him then,” to describe his build, and that was at 17. But the early heartbreak didn’t dim Elliott’s ardor. He had a trial with Crystal Palace, the nearest professional club in South London, but didn’t make the grade. Yet he played any time he could — during lunch periods when he and 30-some classmates would jam onto a patch of ground designed for five-a-side soccer and try to concoct some order, or the myriad opportunities through Wilson’s. Elliott typically played three games in a weekend – Saturday mornings with the school team, Saturday afternoon with grown men for Old Wilsonians and Sundays with another team, plus weeknight games during the school season and the assortment of Old Wilsonian cup matches.

Jack Elliott (back row, second from right) and teammates in 2011. (Handout photo)

It was an unconventional path to pro soccer, but one from which Elliott extracted the maximum return.

“Obviously it was devastating that I was let go at that age, when I was that young,” Elliott said. “But I just kept playing football. I loved playing football. So I just kept doing it and really didn’t expect to go pro. Even through college, I wasn’t thinking, yeah this is going to turn into something, and eventually it just all paid off and worked out.”

“Jack was a very respectful and mature pupil,” said Andy Parkinson, an assistant coach from Wilson’s school team and a midfield mate on Old Wilsonians the day Stratford visited, in an email. “He was clearly very academic, and was dedicated to his studies. On the field he was a steely competitor. Never loud or overly aggressive, but with a great inner drive to succeed. He was undoubtedly a role model for his team.”

So diligent was Elliott then, Parkinson said, that he’d supply the game balls for school matches, favoring one or the other that he felt he struck particularly well.

But when Stratford found him in 2013, Elliott wasn’t planning on professional soccer in his future. Sure, he’d find a way to play on the side of whatever occupation he took up after attending university in England. In the end, the prospect of officially melding his academics with soccer meant it took little cajoling from Stratford to disabuse him of his previous career path.

“I was going to university in England, was going to go and study geography,” Elliott said. “He told me about [West Virginia] and I was like, ‘All right, why not?’ I got the SATs done quickly and it was sorted and I was in America. … I’m glad I got to go to an American university because I would’ve been stuck doing geography.”

Elliott’s tenure with the Union has been an unqualified success, and not just given the diminished expectations of his low draft status. He’s become a first-choice center back, displacing the oft-injured Josh Yaro, a more talented prospect out of college who was selected second overall in 2016. Elliott has a goal and an assist in 35 games (34 starts), and he’s carved out a reputation as both a steady defender and a stellar passer, his pinpoint long balls from the back a crucial aspect of a Union attack that still lacks the players to break teams down between the lines.

Elliott was recognized last season as the runner-up in MLS Rookie of the Year balloting. The winner, German-born and Providence College-educated Julian Gressel, played at a more visible position in midfield and was surrounded by considerably more talent in Atlanta.

“I say this I guess with an apology to Jack, but not many people expected much from him for how many times each team in our league passed on the kid,” Jim Curtin said of a player he calls “a real revelation.” “He’s played with a chip on his shoulder. I think he’s proven a lot of people wrong. I think he’s a guy, a center back that you can build around.”

Stratford and LeBlanc are both adamant that if pro soccer hadn’t worked out for Elliott, he’d be successful in another career. He earned his degree in management and information systems and was West Virginia soccer’s first three-time Academic All-American.

The Union is his career now, and he approaches it with all the zeal that he would any professional pursuit.

“It is everything for me,” Elliott said. “I could still leave and go and get a good job with the degree that I have and the academics that I have. But I wouldn’t want to. When I was going through college and that kind of stuff, I had football and I had academics, and football is obviously what I wanted to do more than go out and get a job. It gave me that extra motivation.”

Stratford may be right in asserting that he’ll never find another player like Elliott, either in the method of discovery or vertiginous ascent. But short of lacing up his boots all over the world, he’s following a similar method.

Stratford moved on from West Virginia in 2014 to Division II power University of Charleston. After three years as an assistant, he took the top job in January 2017 and led the Golden Eagles to the Division II national title in December. Stratford’s roster is global in reach: 12 countries are represented, led by six Brazilians and six Englishmen. Only two players are American – one from Puerto Rico and one from Texas who spent his formative soccer years in Mexico. The standout of last year’s team, Frenchman and Division II national player of the year Thomas Vancaeyezeele, is now with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds in USL.

College soccer is increasingly flavored with international players, as the pathway to the pros has siphoned off the top Academy players straight to pro contracts. Many foreign talents fit a similar profile as Elliott, exiles from academies who see a second chance at a pro career (or at least a subsidized education). For the myriad criticisms of college soccer’s impact on player development, discarding the entire model without regard for the outliers seems reckless. And they are numerous, like Elliott, Gressel and 2016 No. 1 SuperDraft pick Jack Harrison, who went from Manchester United’s academy to Wake Forest to New York City FC to Manchester City.

“We all know how many deficiencies college soccer has in the process, but there’s something about those four years, going away and going to college that helps with that character development,” LeBlanc said. “And Jack is one of those guys. He wasn’t going to be much of anything in soccer if he didn’t have this opportunity. I think that helped him grow, helped him physically grow, helped him grow from a character standpoint.”

Stratford describes the European talent market as “a race to the bottom”: How low can clubs go to outcompete each other betting on boys’ futures? Instead of waiting for them to hit age 12, clubs are trying to lock up potential prospects at seven or eight.

“It’s impossible to say at that point in someone’s age that you’re not going to grow and continue to develop, physically as well,” Stratford said, referring specifically to a 13-year-old Elliott. “They might have jumped the gun a little bit in terms of making that assumption that he wasn’t going to be where he needed to be physically to be a pro, because I think he’s obviously handling that side of the game very, very well at the moment.”

(Winslow Townson/USA TODAY Sports)

Stratford highlights the well-worn legend of Jamie Vardy, who went from the eighth tier of English soccer after Sheffield Wednesday cast him aside at age 15 to the Premier League title with Leicester City and 21 caps (and counting) for the national team. Vardy’s case is an extreme, but players like Elliott and Gressel emerging via college programs happen on a yearly basis.

The pathway isn’t superior to the Academy system that U.S. Soccer and MLS clubs are investing heavily to establish (and explicitly alleviate the ills of decentralized club and college networks). U.S. Soccer is in the midst of a soul-searching after failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, but those conversations are primarily about how to widen the tent to get more players from immigrant or lower-income enclaves past the prohibitive expenses that many pay-to-play programs impose.

Elliott’s case, though, speaks to ensuring that exiting the tent isn’t a one-way transit. His case is evidence for a shift that allows a player not to be defined forever by his ability as a 14-year-old, one that permits a 17- or 19-year-old who didn’t make the grade at 12 a chance to make a second first impression. It also requires academies to acknowledge that they aren’t the only way to develop players.

“If I have one slight criticism or one area where I believe they’re behind, it would be in the tactical component and just that competitive grit,” Stratford said. “And I sometimes question, if I’m completely honest, when I watch Developmental Academy football, how competitive that necessarily is, or does it feel quite manufactured? And there maybe has to be a bit more time spent developing that mentality of that drive, that will to win, that self-belief.”

“You get those skills you pick up every day in different, unstructured football,” Elliott said. “You don’t have a coach telling you, ‘do this, do this, do this.’ You figure it out for yourself and it helps you to learn the game better, helps you learn how to beat an opponent or defend against them.”

The juxtaposition hits home for Elliott. His center-back partnership this year has been with Auston Trusty, a 19-year-old who was in the Union Academy for a decade. Ditto his backup, Mark McKenzie, and left back Matt Real. Elliott understands that this method is the future, certainly compared to a blueprint hinging on after-school kick-arounds and men’s league games.

But Elliott’s vista at the Union’s training complex last week didn’t exist because of the teams he played on as a kid. It owed to the work he put in to improve, the drive to push himself toward a dream others deemed unrealistic. And as he watched the Union’s troupe of young defenders doing just that, spending their customary 20 or so extra minutes after training on extra shots or supplemental passing drills, it matters little how he or they made soccer their vocation. It matters how hard they worked to see that path to its conclusion and how hard they’re willing to work to stay on that road.

“If I didn’t enjoy playing, then I wouldn’t be here,” Elliott said. “I wouldn’t have got to the level that I am now. It’s obviously one of the most important things for a kid going pro. You’ve just got to enjoy it because it’s going to be what you do every day for maybe 20, 30 years. It helps you to be better. If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, you’ll go out and take 20, 30 shots. You’ll go out to a rec game and kick around.”

Jack Elliott (bottom right) and his team at the U14 Surrey Cup Final in 2009. (Handout photo)

Top photo: Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports

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Matthew De George is a sports reporter who has covered the Philadelphia Union since 2013. He is the author of two books on the history of swimming and has covered a variety of high school, college and pro sports in his time with the Delaware County Daily Times.